Featured Work

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to strike down Wisconsin's Republican-backed voter ID restriction, paving the way for the law to take effect in upcoming elections.

The ruling is regarded as a victory for Governor Scott Walker, who championed the law in Wisconsin and has boasted about the state's voting restrictions as he makes the case for a presidential run. Walker defended voter ID during the 2014 gubernatorial race, declaring that "it doesn't matter" if there is only one incident of voter fraud in each election, even though as many as 300,000 Wisconsinites don't have the forms of ID required under the law. Read the rest of this item here.

Two years ago, Walker wielded his veto pen and struck a loophole from the the 2013-15 budget bill that could have inadvertently expanded the state's school voucher program. In last month's budget address, he instead announced that he would lift the cap entirely.

The fossil fuel barons, Charles and David Koch, have long advocated for "economic freedom" and a smaller government. They have slammed "collectivism" and market distorting subsidies.

In 2012, Charles Koch decried corporate welfare and “crony capitalism” in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: “Far too many well-connected businesses are feeding at the federal trough. By addressing corporate welfare as well as other forms of welfare, we would add a whole new level of understanding to the notion of entitlement reform,” he wrote.

The Koch's “secret bank” Freedom Partners has spent hundreds of millions in elections in part to tackle “‘rent-seeking,’ ‘corporate welfare,’ and other forms of cronyism.”

This week, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), took to the Senate floor to call upon America to “wake up” to the damaging effects of climate change denial and the fossil fuel industry funding received by groups that promote it, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate bill mill that has been pushing a destructive agenda of climate change denial.

"ALEC is an organization, which works to undercut climate science and undermine climate progress at the state level, interfering in our state legislatures. ALEC has tried to roll back state renewable fuel standards and has handed out model state legislation to obstruct and tie up the President's Clean Power Plan," Whitehouse boldly stated on the Senate floor.

This week, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed an anti-union right-to-work (RTW) bill into law. RTW laws require unions to provide the same representation and workplace services to all workers in a workplace but make contributing to the cost of that representation optional. They lead to smaller, weaker unions and lower worker wages and benefits.

The Center for Media and Democracy detailed the fact that the Wisconsin bill was taken almost word for word from the American Legislative Exchange Council "model" bill. (See CMD's side-by-side here.) And we reported on the Koch and Bradley Foundation funding behind the panoply of usual suspects that flew into the state to testify on behalf of the bill, including "experts" from the National Right to Work Committee, the Mackinac Center and the Heritage Foundation with assists from ALEC "scholar" Richard Vedder and State Policy Network "stink tanks" like the Wisconsin Public Research Institute. And let's not forget the $1 million in TV ads from the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity group. Read the rest of this item here.

MADISON -- High school and middle school students walked out of class in Madison, Wisconsin on Monday and marched on the state capitol building to demand justice for Tony Robinson, the 19-year old unarmed black man who was shot and killed by white police officer Matthew Kenny on Friday evening, March 6.

Chanting "What's his name? Tony Robinson!" the students from West, Memorial and La Follette High Schools converged on the capitol from all directions joined by UW-Madison students and younger students from Georgia O'Keeffe Middle School. Students from East High walked out and filled East Washington Avenue throughout the morning, marching towards the capitol. Students from Sun Prairie High, Robinson's alma mater, also made their way to the capitol building. The vibrant, peaceful demonstration was featured on national news broadcasts that evening.

Recent Articles from PRWatch.org

Soon after becoming governor in 2011, Scott Walker eliminated funding for the state's first program to track and remedy Wisconsin's worst-in-the-country rate of racial disparities. The program, aimed at monitoring racial profiling during traffic stops, had only taken effect one month earlier, and Walker declared that the repeal "allows law enforcement agencies to focus on doing their jobs."

Then-State Bar President James C. Boll, Jr., said at the time "[t]he data collection just began this year. At best, to repeal this requirement now would signal that the Legislature has concluded, without any empirical basis, that racial profiling does not exist in Wisconsin or is not a significant problem."

As right-to-work (RTW) was fast-tracked through the legislature this week, ALEC legislators were pushing a series of talking points about how the anti-union measures will be a boon to the state's economy, relying on the questionable research of ALEC scholar Richard Vedder.

Vedder claims that incomes in Wisconsin would be $1,600 per year higher if the state had enacted RTW thirty years ago. If that sounds like a stretch, it is. The leading study on the economic effects of right-to-work, from Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz (who is now Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor), found that wages in right-to-work states overall are $1,500 lower. Among the problems in Vedder’s study is his focus on personal income, which combines the stock market gains and other income sources of the very wealthy with the ordinary wages most people live by. Read the rest of this item here.

The testimony at the March 2 hearing on the Wisconsin "right to work" bill was dramatic.

"Imagine leaving the [Capitol] today, ready to get some food when a cab pulls up. Two guys grab you, throw you into the back of the cab. The driver announces that the cab is on its way to Green Bay. You protest. But the other passengers don't let you out. They pull over in Green Bay, the car stops, they untie you and demand $300."

This, says Greg Mourad, VP of the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC), is the way that unions in Wisconsin organize, and why the bill should be passed.

After Scott Walker likened Wisconsin teachers, snowplow drivers, firefighters and cops to terrorists over the weekend, being compared to mere criminals is a step up for union organizers like Eleni Schirmer, who co-chairs the Teaching Assistants Association at UW-Madison. Read the rest of this item here.

In an October 2014 campaign ad, released just a few weeks before election day, Scott Walker looked directly into the camera and told voters, "I support legislation to increase safety and to provide more information for a woman considering her options." He said a bill he supported "leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor."

But this week, Walker announced that he will sign a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks--an extreme limitation that may run afoul of Roe v. Wade--taking the decision away from a woman and her doctor, even when her health is at risk.

Walker is gaining a national reputation as a straight-shooter. “He has a plain-spoken way that is totally relatable. He says what he's going to do and does it,” Mark Block recently told Bloomberg News. Block ran the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity chapter in Wisconsin during Walker's first gubernatorial run.

Editors' Pick

As unions and working people battle "right-to-work" legislation in several states, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and allies have opened another flank in their war on good jobs. Targeted this time are state prevailing wage laws, which require public construction projects to support local wage standards instead of undercutting them. Studies have repeatedly found that prevailing wage laws do not harm taxpayers but are effective in providing something increasingly rare in regional labor markets, upward pressure on wages.

BP announced Monday that it was cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, the controversial corporate bill mill. It is the third major fossil fuel company to sever ties with ALEC, after Occidental Petroleum in 2014. ExxonMobil remains on the ALEC private sector board.

"We continually assess our engagements with policy and advocacy organizations and based on our most recent assessment, we have determined that we can effectively pursue policy matters of current interest to BP without renewing our membership in ALEC," the spokesman told the National Review.

BP (formerly known as "British Petroleum") is a global oil, gas, and chemical company headquartered in London. It is responsible for the largest environmental disaster ever in the United States: the April 20, 2010, blowout of its Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. BP still faces some $13.7 billion dollars in civil liability in the case.

A bipartisan effort to enforce Wisconsin’s longstanding laws governing coordination between campaigns and independent groups has been mislabeled a “partisan witch hunt” by a well-funded legal and media campaign, with the ultimate goal of undermining what remains of limits on big money in politics, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy.

“Anti-coordination laws have become more vital than ever before in the post-Citizens United world, where ‘independent’ political organizations are raising and spending unlimited funds for elections but keeping their donors a secret,” said Brendan Fischer, CMD General Counsel and the author of the report. “If a candidate can coordinate with these secretly-funded groups and establish shadow campaign committees, then the candidate contribution limits and disclosure requirements are rendered meaningless.”

Featured SourceWatch Article

SourceWatch.org is an interactive wiki website that depends on readers like you to improve content. If you want to help us grow SourceWatch with well documented research and become a volunteer editor, click here for more information.

"Right to work" policies undermine unions by preventing them from negotiating contract provisions that require all workers, including non-members, to contribute to the costs of worker representation on the job. "Right to work" encourages workers to "free ride," gaining all the advantages of the union contract without paying a share of the costs of collective bargaining and worker representation. "Right to work" laws do not create a right to employment, do nothing to improve in any way a person's odds of getting or keeping a job, and do not create any jobs.

Advocates of "right to work" like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the Koch-founded and -funded Americans for Prosperity sometimes claim that the laws are needed to protect workers from being forced to join a union or to pay for political campaigning.[3][4] However, federal law already includes provisions for workers who object to union membership, but who are working as part of a bargaining unit represented by a union, as explained by the National Labor Relations Board: "Even under a security agreement, employees who object to full union membership may continue as 'core' members and pay only that share of dues used directly for representation, such as collective bargaining and contract administration. Known as objectors, they are no longer full members but are still protected by the union contract."[5][6][7]

So-called "right to work" laws do not create a right to have or hold a job, and should not be confused with the "right to work" as described in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.[8]

Getting Started on SourceWatch

Looking for somewhere to start?

You can read any SourceWatch article without registering, but if you would like to improve our articles or add new ones, you need to register here. You will be asked to provide an email address to verify that you are a real person and not a computer spamming links to other sites, but your email address will not be shown publicly on your user page. You will also be asked to create a user name, which can be your own name or a pen name. And, if you'd like, you can edit your user page to let readers know more about yourself, your work on SourceWatch, and your research interests -- but that is not required. Once you are registered, you will also be able to contact other editors through their user pages. If you do not wish to register but do want to contact us, you can use the addresses at the bottom of this page.

You can search for existing articles to improve using the search box, but please note that the search feature differentiates words and phrases with capital letters from those that are lower case. Please also visit the pages on our purpose, our tips on editing and citing authoritative sources, and our FAQs for help.

"A truly impressive project based on cutting edge web technology."
—David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.

"The troublemakers at the Center for Media and Democracy, for example, point to dozens of examples of "greenwashing," which they defined as the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government or even a non-government organization to sell a product, a policy" or rehabilitate an image. In the center's view, many enterprises labeled green don't deserve the name.
—Jack Shafer, "Green Is the New Yellow: On the excesses of 'green' journalism," Slate.

"As a journalist frequently on the receiving end of various PR campaigns, some of them based on disinformation, others front groups for undisclosed interests, [CMD's SourceWatch] is an invaluable resource."
—Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire

"Thanks for all your help. There's no way I could have done my piece on big PR and global warming without CMD [the Center for Media and Democracy] and your fabulous websites."
—Zoe Cormier, journalist, Canada

"The dearth of information on the [U.S.] government [lobbying] disclosure forms about the other business-backed coalitions comes in stark contrast to the data about them culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents and posted by SourceWatch, a website that tracks advocacy groups."

Sign up for news and updates from the Center for Media and Democracy!

Optional Member Code

Disclaimer: SourceWatch is part of the Center for Media and Democracy—email the publisher of SourceWatch, CMD's Executive Director, Lisa Graves, via lisa AT prwatch.org. You can also contact our Editor, Friday Thorn, via friday_thorn AT prwatch.org.

Antispam note: To avoid attracting spam email robots, email addresses on SourceWatch are written with AT in place of the usual symbol, and we have removed "mail to" links. Replace AT with the correct symbol to get a valid address.Read the full disclaimer.